Pitch or Ditch for Saturday-Monday, August 21-23

Pitch
or Ditch is a strategy for (ideally) daily mixed leagues in which you
pick up
starters on a day-to-day basis based on how well they are pitching and
their
upcoming matchups, then cut them in favor of new guys the next day. The
concept
is that the shallower the league, the more quality starting pitching is
available on the free agent wire, so rather than drafting expensive
starters,
it’s better to build a strong offense and bullpen and let the free agent
wire
populate your starting staff during the season. As a bonus, a handful of
“PoD”
guys emerge each year as worth keeping all year long, like Jair Jurrjens
last
year or Cliff Lee in ’08.__________________________________________________________________________________

I have Kurt Suzuki as my catcher in a couple of point leagues. In one of them, Ruiz is available and in the other, Ruiz and Soto are. Soto was hitting well before his DL stint and is supposed to come back Sunday. In my minds eye, either one would be an upgrade at this point, but if Suzuki heats up, I might not get him back. Would you make either of these moves? Thanks

I have 4 Starting pitchers going tonight (Oswalt, Garza, Garcia, Buchholz) but with the outing both Cliff Lee and David Price had last night, who would be a pitcher or even a batter that could boost me up in the rankings?
-Matt

I own Strass, want to make sure I have enough SP. Homer Bailey just got picked up. Somebody dropped Hellickson, is he worth stashing on my bench? How would u rate the chances of him beeing back in the rotation in September?

Totally depends on your league’s roster size/layout but generally speaking, in the standard structure of 23 starting players (14 hitters, 9 pitchers), I like to own about seven starting pitchers. But if you pitch or ditch on a regular basis you could probably get by with six.
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fugute,

The Pitch or Ditch blog posts simply advise you whether or not to start a certain pitcher if you own him on your fantasy team, so you’re not restricted to just one pitcher per matchup. In the above example, if you owned Niese, I recommended that you start him (good advice!). Likewise, if you owned McDonald, I recommended that you start him (in retrospect, bad advice!)
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Matt,

Sounds like that question was time sensitive so if you have a follow-up question let me know.
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Danny,

Barring an injury to one of the Rays’ other starters, I doubt that Hellickson will be back in the rotation this year. They’ll be very careful with him and I think he’ll prove to be a very effective weapon out of the bullpen (a la David Price in ’08). In a non-keeper league, it’s fairly safe to leave him on the wire unless you have an already open roster spot and want to hold him for about a week until we’re convinced that both Niemann and Davis are fully healthy.
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beezer,

Tex, Heyward, Rollins, Felix, Upton. B.J. isn’t quite keeper worthy but I’d give him the edge over Roberts. It’s very close though. If you’re allowed to keep fewer than five in exchange for the extra pick at the top of the draft, I’d actually just keep the first four. I think you’ll be able to get both B.J. and Roberts back if you want them.

All three of those guys are outstanding PoD options and even borderline grads but to conserve roster space I’d probably just keep them in a PoD rotation. That said, if I had to pick one it would be Richard, who seems to have righted the ship after struggling throughout most of the past month. Remember that at the start of July he held a 2.74 ERA, so that ought to count for something.

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